‘I wonder, Berkeley,’ said Herbert Le Breton, examining a coin curiously, ‘what on earth can ever have induced you, with your ideas and feelings, to become a parson!’
‘My dear Le Breton, your taste, like good wine, improves with age,’ answered Berkeley, coldly. ‘There are many reasons, any one of which may easily induce a sensible man to go into the Church. For example, he may feel a disinterested desire to minister to the souls of his poorer neighbours; or he may be first cousin to a bishop; or he may be attracted by an ancient and honourable national institution; or he may possess a marked inclination for albs and chasubles; or he may reflect upon the distinct social advantages of a good living; or he may have nothing else in particular to do; or he may simply desire to rouse the impertinent curiosity of all the indolent quidnuncs of his acquaintance, without the remotest intention of ever gratifying their underbred Paul Pry proclivities.’
Herbert Le Breton winced a little—he felt he had fairly laid himself open to this unmitigated rebuff—but he did not retire immediately from his untenable position. ‘I suppose,’ he said quietly, ‘there are still people who really do take a practical interest in other people’s souls—my brother Ronald does for one—but the idea is positively too ridiculous. Whenever I read any argument upon immortality it always seems to me remarkably cogent, if the souls in question were your soul and my soul; but just consider the transparent absurdity of supposing that every Hodge Chawbacon, and every rheumatic old Betty Martin, has got a soul, too, that must go on enduring for all eternity! The notion’s absolutely ludicrous. What an infinite monotony of existence for the poor old creatures to endure for ever—being bored by their own inane personalities for a million aeons! It’s simply appalling to think of!’
But Berkeley wasn’t going to be drawn into a theological discussion—that was a field which he always sedulously and successfully avoided. ‘The immortality of the soul,’ he said quietly, ‘is a Platonic dogma too frequently confounded, even by moderately instructed persons like yourself, Le Breton, with the Church’s very different doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Upon this latter subject, my dear fellow, about which you don’t seem to be quite clear or perfectly sound in your views, you’ll find some excellent remarks in Bishop Pearson on the Creed—a valuable work which I had the pleasure of studying intimately for my ordination examination.’
‘Really, Berkeley, you’re the most incomprehensible and mysterious person I ever met in my whole lifetime!’ said Herbert, dryly. ‘I believe you take a positive delight in deceiving and mystifying one. Do you seriously mean to tell me you feel any interest at the present time of day in books written by bishops?’
‘A modern bishop,’ Berkeley answered calmly, ‘is an unpicturesque but otherwise estimable member of a very distinguished ecclesiastical order, who ought not lightly to be brought into ridicule by lewd or lay persons. On that ground, I have always been in favour myself of gradually reforming his hat, his apron, and even his gaiters, which doubtless serve to render him at least conspicuous if not positively absurd in the irreverent eyes of a ribald generation. But as to criticising his literary or theological productions, my dear fellow, that would be conduct eminently unbecoming in a simple curate, and savouring of insubordination even in the person of an elderly archdeacon. I decline, therefore, to discuss the subject, especially with a layman on whose orthodoxy I have painful doubts.—Where’s Oswald? Is he up yet?’
‘No; he’s down in Devonshire, my brother Ernest writes me.’
‘What, at Dunbude? What’s Oswald doing there?’
‘Oh dear no; not at Dunbude: the peerage hasn’t yet adopted him—at a place called Calcombe Pomeroy, where it seems he lives. Ernest has gone down there from Exmoor for a fortnight’s holiday. You remember, Oswald has a pretty sister—I met her here in your rooms last October, in fact—and I apprehend she may possibly form a measurable portion of the local attractions. A pretty face goes a long way with some people.’
Berkeley drew a deep breath, and looked uneasily out of the window. This was dangerous news, indeed! What, little Miss Butterfly, has the boy with the gauze net caught sight of you already? Will he trap you and imprison you so soon in his little gilded matrimonial cage, enticing you thereinto with soft words and, sugared compliments to suit your dainty, delicate palate? and must I, who have meant to chase you for the chief ornament of my own small cabinet, be only in time to see you pinioned and cabined in your white lace veils and other pretty disguised entanglements, for his special and particular delectation? This must be looked into, Miss Butterfly; this must be prevented. Off to Calcombe Pomeroy, then, or other parts unknown, this very next to-morrow; and let us fight out the possession of little Miss Butterfly with our two gauze nets in opposition—mine tricked as prettily as I can trick it with tags and ends of art-allurements and hummed to in a delicate tune—before this interloping anticipating Le Breton has had time to secure you absolutely for himself. Too austere for you, little Miss Butterfly; good in his way, and kindly meaning, but too austere. Better come and sun yourself in the modest wee palace of art that I mean to build myself some day in some green, sunny, sloping valley, where your flittings will not be rudely disturbed by breath of poverty, nor your pretty feathery wings ruthlessly clipped with a pair of doctrinaire, ethico-socialistic scissors. To Calcombe, then, to Calcombe—and not a day’s delay before I get there. So much of thought, in his own quaint indefinite fashion, flitted like lightning through Arthur Berkeley’s perturbed mind, as he stood gazing wistfully for one second out of his pretty latticed creeper-clad window. Then he remembered himself quickly with a short little sigh, and turned to answer Herbert Le Breton’s last half-sneering innuendo.
‘Something more than a pretty face merely,’ he said, surveying Herbert coldly from head to foot; ‘a heart too, and a mind, for all her flitting, not wholly unfurnished with good, sensible, solid mahogany English furniture. You may be sure Harry Oswald’s sister isn’t likely to be wanting in wits, at any rate.’
‘Oswald’s a curious fellow,’ Herbert went on, changing the venue, as he always did when he saw Berkeley was really in earnest; ‘he’s very clever, certainly, but he can never outlive his bourgeois origin. The smell of tea sticks about him somehow to the end of the chapter. Don’t you know, Berkeley, there are some fellows whose clothes seem to have been born with them, they fit so perfectly and impede their movement so little; while there are other fellows whose clothes look at once as if they’d been made for them by a highly respectable but imperfectly successful tailor. That’s just what I always think about Harry Oswald in the matter of culture. He’s got a great deal of culture, the very best culture, from the very best shop—Oxford, in fact—dressed himself up in the finest suit of clothes from the most fashionable mental tailor; but it doesn’t seem to fit him naturally. He moves about in it uneasily, like a man unaccustomed to be clothed by a good workman. He looks in his mental upholstery like a greengrocer in evening dress. Now there’s all the difference in the world between that sort of put-on culture and culture in the grain, isn’t there? You may train up a grocer’s son to read Dante, and to play Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and to admire Fra Angelico; but you can’t train him up to wear these things lightly and gracefully upon him as you and I do, who come by them naturally. WE are born to the sphere; HE rises to it.’
‘You think so, Le Breton?’ asked the curate with a quiet and suppressed smile, as he thought silently of the placid old shoemaker.
‘Think so! my dear fellow, I’m sure of it. I can spot a man of birth from a man of mere exterior polish any day, anywhere. Talk as much nonsense as you like about all men being born free and equal—they’re not. They’re born with natural inequalities in their very nerve and muscle. When I was an undergraduate, I startled one of the tutors of that time by beginning my English essay once, “All men are by nature born free and unequal.” I stick to it still; it’s the truth. They say it takes three generations to make a gentleman; nonsense utterly; it takes at least a dozen. You can’t work out the common fibre in such a ridiculous hurry. That results as a simple piece of deductive reasoning from all modern theories of heredity and variation.’
‘I agree with you in part, Le Breton,’ the parson said, eyeing him closely; ‘in part but not altogether. What you say about Oswald’s very largely true. His culture sits upon him like a suit made to order, not like a skin in which he was born. But don’t you think that’s due more to the individual man than to the class he happens to belong to? It seems to me there are other men who come from the same class as Oswald, or even from lower classes, but whose culture is just as much ingrained as, say, my dear fellow, yours is. They were born, no doubt, of naturally cultivated parents. And that’s how your rule about the dozen generations that go to make a gentleman comes really true. I believe myself it takes a good many generations; but then none of them need have been gentlemen, in the ordinary sense of the word, before him. A gentleman, if I’m to use the expression as implying the good qualities conventionally supposed to be associated with it, a gentleman may be the final outcome and efflorescence of many past generations of quiet, unobtrusive, working-man culture—don’t you think so?’
Herbert Le Breton smiled incredulously. ‘I don’t know that I do, quite,’ he answered languidly. ‘I confess I attach more importance than you do to the mere question of race and family. A thoroughbred differs from a cart-horse, and a greyhound from a vulgar mongrel, in mind and character as well as in body. Oswald seems to me in all essentials a bourgeois at heart even now.’
‘But remember,’ Berkeley said, rather warmly for him, ‘the bourgeois class in England is just the class which must necessarily find it hardest to throw off the ingrained traces of its early origin. It has intermarried for a long time—long enough to have produced a distinct racial type like those you speak of among dogs and horses—the Philistine type, in fact—and when it tries to emerge, it must necessarily fight hard against the innate Philistinism of which it is conscious in its own constitution. No class has had its inequality with others, its natural inferiority, so constantly and cruelly thrust in its face; certainly the working-man has not. The working-man who makes efforts to improve himself is encouraged; the working-man who rises is taken by the hand; the working-man, whatever he does, is never sneered at. But it’s very different with the shopkeeper. Naturally a little prone to servility—that comes from the very necessities of the situation—and laudably anxious to attain the level of those he considers his superiors, he gets laughed at on every hand. Being the next class below society, society is always engaged in trying to kee............